Wednesday, August 12, 2009

How Many Buses (Trains and Planes) Have You Run For?

There’s a common thread to travel and that is people late for their ride or flight. Watch next time you’re in a terminal of your choice and there’s guaranteed to be plenty of people scurrying about trying their hardest to: 1) not miss their intended trip, and 2) be as stressed as they possibly can.

And it’s the same with being caught in the rain. I found recently after needing to run from my car to the office in the rain that becoming saturated is an every-now-and-then unavoidable event. I recalled it happening to me previously. It seems to happen to almost everyone at some point or other.

The key thing is we are destined to be late from time to time and we’re equally destined to be rained on from time to time. We could add to this list a multitude of other unpleasant life experiences; not only does the good come, but also the bad.

What can we learn?

Well, we can try to be consistently 5-10 minutes early for all our engagements (but that doesn’t cater for those which literally come out of the blue), or we can resign ourselves to the inevitability of these things and just simply (and calmly) roll with it.

It’s a tragedy when people chronically run late and become stressed when all of the capacities of remedy are within our easy grasp, if we’d only commit to learning from our mistakes at not living life wisely and not allow external circumstances to deter our peace. Then again, none of us are perfect, and I guess that’s the point.

Besides all this, we’ll almost certainly be late or rushing for a bus, train or plane sometime over the next year. Makes life exciting, doesn’t it?